Dust to Glory on the Mojave Road [Sponsored]

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It is very easy to miss the turn-off for the Mojave Road. I know this because I missed it, twice, and only realized I’d missed it the first time when I happened to glance out the window and see a ribbon of blonde sand snaking away from U.S. Route 95, an arrow-straight two-lane highway that traverses Nevada from north to south. This is desolate country, a land of sand and dirt and scrubby plants no taller than your knee, where July days regularly hit triple digits, billboards warn of the perils of methamphetamine, and one mile of road looks like the next which looks like the next. On U.S. 95, I saw my first real-life tumbleweed. And then several more.

We’d left Vegas two hours before, two guys in a truck, and were only 15 minutes past the last sign of civilization we expected to see for at least a day—a gas station where we took care of the essentials, like fuel and jerky—when I happened to glimpse that little snake of sand. It snapped me out of a driving trance, causing me to ask my friend and navigator, Alex, to check his GPS. Was that ribbon of sand the Mojave Road?

This was surprising. But we’d only just passed it, by the look of the map, so I turned around and headed back north as Alex watched our blue dot approach the white stripe marking the road on his iPhone until . . . we missed it a second time.

“It should have been right there,” he said, as we passed a less obvious “road” that seemed to have no markings of any kind. That couldn’t be right, though. The Mojave Road is one of the country’s most famous and popular dirt routes, a fixture on every list of the best off-road trips in America (including our own)—roughly 140 miles of allegedly decent double-track that crosses the Mojave National Preserve, starting just across the Nevada border, in California, and proceeding west nearly to Interstate 15.

The Mojave Road is an ancient route, in use as long as humans have lived in this vast, harsh desert, first as a Native American trade route from the Colorado River through the Cajon Pass toward the Pacific coast, and then later as a path west for missionaries, explorers, and settlers on foot and horseback, and in wagons.

The first non-Native American human to make their way across was a Franciscan missionary from Spain named Francisco Garcés, who did it on foot in 1776. In 1826, the trapper, trader, and explorer Jedediah Smith—known for a huge facial scar caused by a grizzly in one of three bear attacks he survived in his life—crossed the route, and by the mid 19th century a wave of settlers began to use the road to reach California, causing the U.S. Army to set up a series of outposts to protect the settlers. Finally, 165 years later, we would become the first Brooklyn-based English-Scotch-German-American journalist and Iranian-American photographer team to complete the route in a 2015 Ford F-150 4×4 while surviving on jerky, hot dogs, and peanut M&Ms. It would be a minor accomplishment, but an accomplishment nonetheless.

First, though, we had to find the road. On the third pass, we spotted it, a rutted and rocky thing, marked only by a thin strip of reflective metal—a sign barely wider than the pole that held it up.

“That’s the sign?” Alex asked, incredulously.

“Apparently,” I replied.

We turned in and were off.

Because it’s a National Preserve, the Mojave has slightly more liberal use policies that it would have if it were a national park. Hunting, for instance, is welcome, and so is off-road driving, as long as you stay on marked routes and arrive in a street-legal vehicle. The National Park Service page for what it calls the “Mojave Road 4-Wheel Drive Route” isn’t exactly forbidding. It says only that certain sections can be “rough and sandy” and recommends—but doesn’t mandate—four-wheel-drive. I thought, upon reading this page, that I could probably do it in my Subaru Forester, but I arranged to borrow a “caribou” colored F-150 4×4 from Ford just to be safe. Let me now say that this was wise. My car would have hated the Mojave Road. This I knew within the first half-hour of our trip.

The Mojave isn’t the Rubicon, but it’s also not U.S. 95. After a relatively short section of hard-pack sand that passed under a set of giant electric lines ferrying electrons south through the desert, the route quickly became rutted and rocky, so much so that I was crawling carefully along in the truck, picking my way around wheel-sized stones and avoiding deep ruts that appeared to have been cut by recent rains. The Mojave desert gets only five inches of rain a year, but when those rains fall, they fall heavy, and the flash floods that surge down from the highlands cut ravines in the soft earth. These ravines can be deep, certainly deep enough to swallow a smaller, less capable vehicle’s front end.

On rare occasions, and for short periods, we achieved 15 mph, but it was very clear why most guides recommend two or three days to cover a distance that would take less than three hours on pavement. We were thankful for a 4×4 system with locking differentials and especially high ground clearance. The F-150 just bounded along, high above the danger. With the AC blasting at three-quarter power, and a comfortable, gigantic SuperCrew cabin nearly as big as my first New York City studio apartment, the fact that it was 103 outside mattered only in some theoretical future in which we were forced to abandon the truck and survive in the outdoors.

“Yeah, that’s hot,” Alex said, upon returning from a trip to water some thorny shrubs. Sweat trickled down his forehead. The dash temperature gauge read 104. “How long do you think we could survive out here?”

Our gas tank was newly filled. “So even if the truck broke or the road became totally impassible we could probably run the AC on low for a long time,” I said. We’d also just spent $330 at Wal-Mart stocking up on road trip and camp essentials, such as bottled water, hot dogs, various bags of nuts, granola bars, chips, cinnamon rolls, bananas, and some antiseptic and pain relievers for possible snake, scorpion, and spider bites.

“You’re right,” he said, snapping open a bag of Doritos. “We’d be fine.”

We discussed the conventional wisdom that it’s better to stay with your vehicle in an emergency than to abandon ship and go for help. The guy who does that always ends up in trouble. Especially when the environment is as brutal and unforgiving as the Mojave Desert in July. “This is a pretty popular road,” I said, despite the fact that we’d yet to see a single sign of human activity. “Eventually, someone’s going to come by.”

These are the kinds of conversations you have on road trips, when there are hours to burn and limited options for entertainment. What radio we could get out there was awful, so mostly we had only our own voices, or silence. Outside, there was no wind, only the whir of the engine fan, and the ping of small rocks bouncing up against the undercarriage.

The road began to climb and I navigated my way carefully around several switchbacks, one of which was so washed out that a single bad storm would almost certainly erase what remained of the road. I dropped a tire in tentatively, and then another, but the truck sat plenty high enough, and we continued on.

After several hundred feet of vertical climbing, the landscape flattened onto a high plain covered in creosote and desert holly. To our right, the large mesas of the Castle Mountains loomed beyond Fort Piute, some famous ruins we decided to skip because neither of us felt the need for photos of ourselves standing next to old rocks.

At the very top of the climb, where the road crested, stood an old yellow sign that had faded nearly to white. It warned vehicles coming from the other direction that the road—after countless miles of being straight and flat—was about to get steep and curvy. This being outlaw territory, the sign was riddled with bullet holes.

It was nearly sundown before we glimpsed a human. For five hours of slow but steady forward progress, we saw only dirt, sand, rock, cactus, and scrubby brush, plus mesas and the occasional jagged peak in the distance. Non-human life was surprisingly abundant, not only in the Mojave’s stubborn plants, but also in its animal residents. Jackrabbits, their stiff, pointed ears at least as long as their torsos, sat rigid and attentive, and then, almost without fail, bolted into the road and narrowly avoided being crushed by what was almost certainly the only vehicle they’d see all day. Lined ground squirrels had similar inclinations, as did the little chipmunks and roadrunners. A consistent thread among all ground-dwelling animals we encountered seemed to be an instinct to run directly into traffic, and living out here, in these conditions, who could blame them?

Birds were less suicidal-seeming. They flitted in and out of juniper and Joshua trees. A hawk lifted from a gnarly branch and dove toward the desert floor. Far, far overhead, a group of vultures circled over something, hopefully not us.

I’d read somewhere that the settlement of Goffs was worth the 18-mile detour on Ivanpah Road, the first quasi-major dirt route we crossed. It bisects the park from north to south, so we turned left onto it just after a cluster of trailers that looked like some crazy person’s vacation compound, currently unoccupied.

Originally a railroad depot and then a military base famous for its school, Goffs is one step above a ghost town, with a restored old time-y village that is open only for a few months a year, and certainly not in the dead of summer.

A sign declared that 23 hardy souls still call Goffs home, but they appeared to all be away when we passed through. Maybe they were out buying gas, or groceries, since Goffs has no functioning shops. There is an old filling station with broken windows and collapsing walls that looks like it’s been closed for decades; the pumps are long gone. Still, someone bothered to spray paint “no gas” on a sheet of particleboard just in case someone was so delirious that they mistook it for an actual business.

Finally, at 5:32, the temperature dropped below 100 for the first time all day and it was either that or the sound of our engine that brought an actual human out of hiding on a golf cart. I spied him, in my rearview mirror, emerging from a fenced property guarded by CCTV cameras. I braked and reversed, thinking we’d talk to him about life out here, but he reversed too, and disappeared back behind his gates. That was the first and last human we’d see all day.

Our first campsite was a spectacular spot, at the foot of a pile of enormous rocks, the largest of which was easily the height of a three-story building. They were rounded and tan and incredibly dramatic, all alone on a high desert plane that was otherwise empty so that they seemed to have been dropped from the sky by a wandering giant.

July is the Mojave’s hottest month (average temp: 96 degrees) and a time that most tourists sensibly avoid, but the upside of going to a desert at the worst possible time is that if you can endure the conditions—by arriving in a vehicle that can handle the road and has dependable air-conditioning, for instance—you can have the park essentially to yourself, and that’s how we felt. If you’ve ever wondered what it feels like to be totally alone in the world, try the Mojave Preserve in July.

The Preserve is one of America’s youngest and largest parks, created by an act of Congress in 1994 and containing 1.6 million acres, which makes it the third biggest piece of the national park system in the lower 48. It’s a vast parcel by any measure, but being so flat and remote, it feels practically endless when you’re inside, and I’m not sure I’ve ever felt as isolated (in a good way) as I did a the foot of those rocks when the sun went down.

If nothing else, desert weather is consistent: Hot during the day, and cool at night. Each evening brings a vivid red-orange sunset, which gives way to a rising curtain of black sky so peppered with stars that you feel as if you’re sleeping inside a planetarium. Alex took a photo of what I thought was a cloud but which turned out to be the Milky Way, so clear and obvious that it looked almost fake.

We burned some mesquite branches, ate hot dogs without ketchup (the shopping trip’s one mission failure: we forgot condiments), and took in the starry night sky until it was finally cool enough to get into our tents.

Shortly before dawn I awoke to the sound of a loud and incessant buzz circling above my head, just outside the tent’s thin nylon roof. It was a deep and angry buzz, more like a bee than a fly and sounded to be at least the size of a small bird. Fortunately, it was outside, but whatever it was, it seemed determined to breach the interior. Could I smell that bad already?

Regardless, it provided some service. The annoying insect woke me up in time take in the sunrise, and the huge rocks began to light up around 5. First, they turned pink, then orange, then yellow, then pink-y, orange-y yellow. The day would now come up fast. We broke down camp before the comfortable overnight temperatures rose back to daytime norms, which I would describe as “center rack of a 450-degree oven.”

We’d seen a set of headlights just before bed, passing on a road far enough away that we couldn’t hear the motor, and that felt like a rude intrusion. What were these people doing in our private reserve? But within the first couple hours of driving over some good, well-graded road the second day we passed two more cars, and that qualified as rush hour in the Mojave. This made some sense when we reached a junction with the Kelso-Cima Road, an actual paved route that runs alongside a still-active section of the Union Pacific Railroad. Trucks use this route to traverse the park from north to south, and it’s the easiest way to day trip into the preserve’s center, home to some of its most impressive features, from the paved highways outside the park.

We veered south, to one of those features, the incredible white sand mountains of the Kelso Dunes, the tallest of which rises 650 feet above the desert floor. It was too hot to hike them, but we walked far enough to snap some decent photos, then headed back north, on a second detour, ahead of schedule and with time to spare. We passed through a “town” marked as Cima on the map. It consisted of a store (closed), a couple abandoned sheds, and some railroad equipment.

“Why is that on the map?” Alex asked, sensibly.

Just past Cima, we entered a Joshua tree forest that went on for miles in the shadow of the monolithic Cima Dome — in fact, I later read, it’s the largest Joshua tree forest on earth—and eventually led to an exit off Interstate 15, where I encountered something I’d never seen before: A urinal styled like a faux waterfall that the filling station/gift shop/jerky outpost billed as a tourist attraction. I’m not kidding. A sign on the men’s room door read: “WATERFALL URINAL INSIDE: 2 or 3 can go at a time. Don’t be shy.”

Themes develop on trips. Motifs recur. You find yourself repeating things, over and over, especially adjectives. For the Mojave, that adjective was “otherworldly.” It took me at least a day to realize how often I was saying it and when I looked at my notes later I found the word scrawled at least seven times, between the sweat and grease stains, but upon further reflection, I’m not sure there’s a better word for what you see out there—a series of landscapes that are barren in very distinct and different ways. Scrubby high desert gives way to sandy white desert which gives way to rocky red desert. There are jagged hills, flat hills, and hills made from gigantic piles of rocks.

There’s a reason NASA uses deserts to simulate conditions on Mars, because what’s out there in space isn’t going to be comfortable, and neither is the desert. But sometimes a harsh and inhospitable place is beautiful because of its extremes, and in the Mojave the environment is so different than where most of us live that it does seem like another world.

Everything you touch in a desert is hot or dry or thorny, because if a plant has somehow managed to survive out there, it’s damn well not going to make itself easily devoured. Varmints that eat thorny plants, then, have adapted to uncomfortable eating and most of the animals without fur are nasty or poisonous or both. All of this makes you appreciate what comfort a vehicle offers, in its actual, everyday luxuries like cool air and padded seats, as well as its life-saving potential as a method to escape back into a world where survival is much easier, if and when necessary.

Well into the afternoon of the second day, back on the Mojave Road proper, we came upon its famous guest book, mounted on a stand under a tattered American flag. The book lives in a metal box covered in stickers and filled with odds and ends, such as a can of Coors Light, a screwdriver, a pen, some rolling papers, a $50 bill, and a copy of the murder mystery novel “Outwitting Trolls” by William J. Tapply. We signed our names and pushed on.

The land drops from there, and the park’s western flats start with a large volcanic plain known as the Cinder Cone Lava Beds, so-named for the reddish peaks with rounded tops that are all that remains from a set of ancient volcanoes that left this section of red earth covered in jagged black lava rocks. Here is some of the best off-roading in the park, and a series of old and insanely technical 4×4 trails streak those peaks from a time when ATVs and rock crawlers were welcome, before this was a national preserve.

A few of these roads remain, though, and we followed one, after waking up in our campsite on the morning of our third and final day. I found the trail at the end of a wisp of road, barely wider than the truck, that circled around the back of a large hill where we’d set up camp. The road narrowed further and then climbed up one of the cinder cones, getting rockier and more rutted until I wasn’t sure driving any further was a good idea. Going back, though, seemed worse, so I pushed on, and the four-wheel drive F-150 in low gear never once gave in to the terrain, even on street tires.

This was one of two times I had the slightest concern during the two-and-a-half day trip. The other came hours later, shortly after we passed Old Dad Mountain, which looms over Jackass Creek, and reached Soda Dry Lake, a flat white plain that was once a prehistoric lake that dried up almost 9,000 years ago, leaving salt deposits in its place. These so-called “playa lakes” provide some of the flattest land on earth and tire tracks revealed that many, many drivers have been out there, raising hell. The lakebed has a mirage-effect that makes it look like parts are covered in water, and in fact after big storms, water can pool up and make the ground muddy enough that you need a serious 4×4 just to get across. People get stuck here, often. We had no such issues.

The F-150 raced across the plain, kicking up white dust — salt, actually. On the lake’s western edge, a huge pile of rocks forms the Traveler’s Monument, where you’re supposed to leave a rock upon reaching that point, for good luck, as people have for more than a century. The thermometer here reached a new high: 109 degrees. You could probably fry an egg on the hood at that temperature. We didn’t try, because we had no eggs.

The second time I worried, but only a little, came on the lake’s far shore, when the road shifted from hard pack to soft sand rather suddenly and I realized, too late and on an uphill grade, that I was in 2WD mode. The wheels began to dig in and I had no choice but to stop and shift to 4 Low, causing the truck to bog down further. I could feel the F-150 sinking as we inched forward, but the truck never stopped, even as the wheels sunk to mid-axle in sand the consistency of yogurt. The wheels spun fast as we crawled along, but somehow the truck found traction and kept momentum, churning away, ever so slowly, until we crested the rise and headed downhill.

“That’s impressive, especially on these tires,” Alex said.

“Yes,” I replied, patting the dash. “And I’d like to apologize to the truck, since that was 100% my fault.”

Looking north, the settlement of Zzyzx (pronounced, apparently, “zy-zeks”) was visible, hard against some rocky mountains on the lake’s edge. Shimmering on a patch of high ground dotted with palm trees, the settlement looked like another mirage, and it beckoned. I set out to reach it.

Unfortunately, this wasn’t as easy as pointing the truck in a straight line across the huge dry lake. Three different attempts to reach Zzyzx on marked roads failed. Each looked to be in fine condition, but was posted, “Wilderness boundary – motor vehicles prohibited”—meaning that to reach the knobby oasis you’d have to get out and walk, which seemed like a really bad idea.

That bummed me out, because I’d read about Zzyzx, and I was determined to get there. Originally an army base called Camp Soda, and later the settlement of Soda Springs, Zzyzx is now home of Cal State University’s Desert Studies Center, a center, I can only assume, where students study the desert. Its most interesting era, though, was from 1944 to 1974, when a radio evangelist named Curtis Howe Springer filed a mining claim on the land with his wife and opened the Zzyzx Mineral Springs resort after failing to set up similar spas in Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Iowa.

Springer is the kind of character who would seem unbelievable if you read about him in a novel, but who somehow was actually a real person. Before moving to the Mojave, he traveled around pretending to be all kinds of things, including an osteopath and a college dean, making enough of a ruckus that the Journal of American Medicine saw fit to publish a story in 1936 titled, “Curtis Howe Springer: A Quack and his Nostrums.” Springer named the place Zzyzx to torment the postal service and, in a flash of marketing panache, to make the resort “the last word in health.”

Though the site had legitimate springs, they weren’t hot, so Springer faked his own, using a boiler to heat water that was directed into several pools. He recruited homeless men from Skid Row in L.A. to help build the place out, and eventually moved there permanently himself, where he continued to broadcast his radio show, soliciting donations in exchange for various tinctures that he claimed could cure all kinds of diseases and afflictions.

In 1974, the Federal government took Springer to court to argue that his claim to the property was illegal, and won, and the colorful charlatan was evicted along with a few hundred followers. He was subsequently convicted of false advertising for his ridiculous potions and cures and served 49 days in jail. The US government turned the land over to Cal State and its been a research facility ever since.

Springer’s most important accomplishment, arguably, was a happy accident: With no intention of doing such a thing, he managed to almost single-handedly saved a rare species of fish known as the Mojave Chub. Previously found only in the Mojave River, which is nearly dry, the chub took up residence and thrived in a lake Springer built on the property for swimming. Today, the endangered species survives only because of the lake.

We wouldn’t make it to the Mojave River ourself. We’d made a huge detour to reach Zzyzx—reversing course across the lake, onto a glorified goat trail that seemed at any moment likely to become impassable, and finally through the town of Baker, home of the world’s tallest thermometer—because I felt posterity demanded it, and it cost us the opportunity to finish the last 20 miles of the Mojave Road. But we were rewarded for the effort, anyway.

On the approach to “town,” a cluster of sand-colored trailers, we encountered a family of big horn sheep snacking on lakeside grass. They seemed nonplussed to see two humans arriving in a large truck, and slowly ambled across the road and then up a steep hillside covered in loose rock. Their sure-footedness was astounding; it was as if they were walking on flat ground when in fact they were navigating terrain that humans would need ropes to manage. This, I realized, is an animal so rugged and versatile that it is essentially nature’s all-terrain-vehicle. Every 4×4 pales in comparison.

Then again, sheep don’t have AC, and they’re not very good on highways. Running short on time, we abandoned the final stretch of Mojave sand for the smooth pavement of I-15 and raced through the Cajon Pass a day before a fire broke out there and jumped into the freeway, destroying 20 cars.

That night in L.A., I went out to the hotel pool and looked up, hoping for yet another spectacular show in the sky. But this was the city, and it never came. Some things happen only in deserts. I went out for pizza instead.

* To see more images from our trip down the Mojave Road, check out our photography gallery. This article is part of The Code, an editorial partnership between Car and Driver and Ford F-150.